As I am driving to work on this dreary Monday morning, I encounter a bit of congestion on the freeway–but not enough to slow down traffic.  A few minutes later, I see flashing lights behind me.  It is an unmarked law-enforcement SUV, and he is apparently heading to an emergency of some sorts.  I make my way over to the right shoulder to let him by, and notice that there is nothing identifying this vehicle as even being an official vehicle other than the flashing lights in the grill and on the back doors.  The license plate was a state government plate, which (in my state) could mean it was a state, county, city, or educational institution vehicle.

I normally wouldn’t have a problem yielding to an emergency vehicle, but today I did.  You see, this unmarked law enforcement SUV turned off his lights after he passed the majority of the traffic.  The congested spot was going the speed limit and not slowing down traffic, but apparently this was too slow for the unmarked cop car.  The unmarked vehicle passed me and the others at a speed that was well over the speed limit.  A few miles later, the SUV was back in traffic and doing the speed limit–but with no flashing lights.  This left me even more confused until I realized what had happened over these short few miles–we crossed county lines and he is probably now in jurisdiction where he has to behave.  The bottom line is the cop used his flashing lights to get around traffic even though he had no legitimate need to do so.  This person is someone who feels they are above the law and are entitled to not only use emergency lights in an unofficial manner, but also to drive at speeds above the speed limit.  And because they are in a semi-unmarked cop car outside of their jurisdiction, they know there is pretty much a guarantee they will get away with it.  I am going to call this person, Officer Unaccountable.

What happened to folks being accountable for their actions?  Slowly over time, this cop morphed into the pile of garbage he is because folks didn’t hold him accountable for minute and trivial things.  It probably started with him speeding in his cop car, then morphed into him driving his cop car to his house 25 miles away (even though he is only supposed to drive it a maximum of 5 miles), then he was promoted and talked his way into an unmarked car, and soon realized that cars will yield to his emergency lights even if he just uses them for fun.  Today, it would take me hours to trace down what agency this vehicle belongs to and who I would need to contact to file a complaint.

This story has bearing on things locally and nationally.  Everyone is pissed off about big executives getting huge bonuses and making millions of dollars.  Being upset at them is ridiculous–you need to be upset at all the people that enabled them to get to this point.  An assembly line worker didn’t just walk into a CEO position one day and have money thrown at them.  These CEOs worked their way up the corporate ladder, and eventually were making ridiculous amounts of money.  Who enabled them?  The shareholders did.  In a normal corporation, there is a board of directors.  This board of directors is elected by the shareholders.  Shareholders who are pissed off about the executives should stop whining and begging for government intervention–and instead should use their shareholder voting rights to elect different leadership.  But oh no…Why would the shareholders ever hold themselves accountable for the idiots they have allowed to be in power?  I am going to call these folks Mr. and Mrs. Unaccountable Shareholder.

What about all the people and businesses asking for a bailout?  This is just getting ridiculous.  In a normal world, people are held accountable for their financial decisions.  When you sign the dotted line on a new mortgage, you agree to make payments as agreed upon in the loan contract.  You should have done your homework prior to signing this line and determined how much you could afford to borrow.  Instead, you have more idiots who went out and got a $250K adjustable rate mortgage on a house with an artificially inflated value. And when the interest rates went up, these folks came crying to the government for help.  The flood of homes in this situation caused housing values to drop back to where they should be and this made a perfect storm.  The folks, like me, who bought a reasonably priced home with a FIXED-RATE mortgage, have no worries–except about how they are going to be paying for the STUPIDITY of others.  Instead of holding the “stupids” accountable, the government is instead helping them pay for their mortgage and rewriting the contract loans for them.  Mr. and Mrs. Live Above Our Means are crying out claiming that the banks are to blame, yada yada yada bullshit.  I would love to hear them out, but the last time I checked–the banks were not holding guns to their heads, forcing them to sign the papers for the adjustable rate mortgage for their overpriced stupid house.

Now…what about the banks?  Have the banks done wrong?  Nope.  The banks have merely done what people have allowed them to do.  The entire banking mess stems from the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.  This act created a PRIVATE centralized banking system, with very little accountability and oversight.  Over a period of several decades, this private banking system has devalued the US dollar by creating massive amounts of money out of thin air.  They have done this through fractional lending and this practice ultimately ends with a collapse of the dollar.  Citizens of the USA need not cry about how the banks have ruined everything, but instead should cry out to the government to END the Federal Reserve banking system.  The US Government, not the banks, needs to be held accountable for the current fiasco.

Some things will never change though.  Things will remain the same as long as folks keep watching American Idol and believing that creating trillions of dollars of new currency to bail out our economy.  Officer Unaccountable, Mr. & Mrs. Unaccountable Shareholders, and Mr. & Mrs. Live Above Our Means will remain unaccountable and will continue to see themselves in the wrong light–instead of doing what is right and admitting they have done some wrong.